Best Marcel Proust Quotes

List Criteria: Vote up or down on your favorite quotes

A list of the best Marcel Proust quotes. List is arranged by which ones are the most famous Marcel Proust quotes and which have proven the most popular with visitors to this page. All the top quotes from Marcel Proust should be listed here, but if any were missed you can add more quotes by Marcel Proust at the end of the list. This list includes notable Marcel Proust quotes on various subjects; if you are looking for subject-specific quotes, those can also be found on Ranker. Vote on the following Marcel Proust quotations list so that only the greatest quotes rise to the top, as the order of the list changes dynamically based on votes. Don't let your favorite Marcel Proust sayings get to the bottom of the list! List contains items like We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. andThere are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book. Marcel Proust

) open

2

+16

-0

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes. Marcel Proust

) open

3

+26

-1

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. Marcel Proust

) open

4

+12

-0

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. Marcel Proust

) open

5

+9

-1

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full. Marcel Proust

) open

6

+7

-1

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus. Marcel Proust

) open

7

+5

-0

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. Marcel Proust

) open

8

+6

-1

In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things. Marcel Proust

) open

9

+7

-2

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination. Marcel Proust

) open

10

+7

-3

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. Marcel Proust

) open

11

+5

-1

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey. Marcel Proust

) open

12

+4

-0

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Marcel Proust

) open

13

+4

-0

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. Marcel Proust

) open

14

+4

-0

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain we obey. Marcel Proust

) open

15

+4

-0

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing. Marcel Proust

) open

16

+4

-0

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last. Marcel Proust

) open

17

+4

-1

We become moral when we are unhappy. Marcel Proust

) open

18

+3

-0

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change. Marcel Proust

) open

19

+3

-1

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train. Marcel Proust

) open

20

+3

-1

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill. Marcel Proust

) open

21

+3

-1

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship. Marcel Proust

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient? Marcel Proust

) open

24

+2

-0

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us. Marcel Proust

) open

25

+2

-0

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much. Marcel Proust

) open

26

+2

-0

Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions Marcel Proust

) open

27

+2

-0

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left. Marcel Proust

) open

28

+2

-1

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice. Marcel Proust

) open

29

+2

-1

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground. Marcel Proust

) open

30

+2

-1

People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others. Marcel Proust

) open

31

+1

-0

A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped. Marcel Proust

) open

32

+1

-0

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true. Marcel Proust

) open

33

+1

-0

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen. Marcel Proust

) open

34

+1

-0

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison. Marcel Proust

) open

35

+1

-0

Everything great that we know has come from neurotics never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. Marcel Proust

) open

36

+1

-0

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it. Marcel Proust

) open

37

+1

-1

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves. Marcel Proust

) open

38

+1

-1

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. Marcel Proust

) open

39

+0

-0

The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves. Marcel Proust

) open

40

+0

-0

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit. Marcel Proust

) open

41

+0

-0

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind. Marcel Proust

) open

42

+0

-0

I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter. Marcel Proust

) open

43

+0

-0

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace. Marcel Proust

) open

44

+0

-0

That translucent alabaster of our memories. Marcel Proust

) open

45

+0

-0

Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night. Marcel Proust

) open

46

+0

-0

The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity. Marcel Proust

) open

47

+0

-0

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves. Marcel Proust

) open

48

+1

-2

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement. Marcel Proust

) open

49

+1

-2

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions. Marcel Proust

) open

50

+0

-1

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love. Marcel Proust

Information and media on this page and throughout Ranker is supplied by , , Calais, Wikipedia, Ranker users, and other sources. Freebase content is freely licensed under the CC-BY license and Wikipedia content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation license.